Chicago Adventure Therapy

Using outdoor adventure sports like paddling, orienteering, camping, cycling, and rock climbing, Chicago Adventure Therapy (CAT) helps under-served youth in Chicago have a lasting positive impact on their communities and become healthy adults by teaching effective social skills and strong leadership skills, increasing participants’ sense of possibility, and fostering a sense of empowerment and personal responsibility.

10th Anniversary!

2018 marks our 10th program season. We’re looking back in order to look forward.

Monthly photo contests

At the beginning of every month this year, we’re posting a photo album to Facebook with our 10 favorite photos from one year – and asking you to vote for your favorite. We’ll be posting the winner on the 15th of each month. In November, we’ll post the winner from each of our first 10 years, and ask you to choose the best photo from our first decade of programming. Here’s February’s winner, from our 2009 program season.

Weekly videos

We’ve been interviewing CAT youth and leaders. Every week, we’re bringing you videos sharing what they have to say about CAT. We’ll have different theme each month. To see all the videos, you can watch on our YouTube channel or our Facebook page. January’s theme was Adventure. Here’s the first video in February’s theme – Leadership.

February Video – “Leading with Humility”

Calendar of Activities

Make sure to check our calendar tab to learn more about current programming and events!

Who We Work With

Chicago youth face overwhelming challenges every day. CAT works with and has worked with youth:

receiving or in need of mental health treatment

in or exciting the state foster care system

experiencing homelessness

experiencing poverty

who are gang-involved

who have experienced or are at-risk of interpersonal or community violence

who identify as LGBTQ

who are refugees from war-torn countries

You Make it Possible

We believe that no individual or agency should be unable to participate because of financial reasons, so we work with each referring agency to negotiate a realistic price for them. Over 50% of our budget is raised through the generous contributions of individuals like you.